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quote of the day

On reading and understanding the New Testament first in its historical context and not our own:

To concentrate attention on the New Testament alone is to concentrate on that which made the first Christians different from their Jewish contemporaries and to ignore what they had in common. Indeed, a distortion often arises because it is forgotten that most–if not all–of the New Testament was written from within the context of Judaism. I suspect that we tend to underestimate the Jewishness of the New Testament. The antithesis which we naturalyl make between Jew and Christian is foreign to Paul: for him the natural antithesis is Jew and Gentile. For him, Christianity is the true fulfiment [sic] of Judaism, which paradoxically embraces Gentiles.